You're also not locked into the camera-defined 3D effects, thanks to the camera's parallax adjustment controls. A toggle control on the top left of the camera lets you either offset the stereo images more than the camera's automated settings do (generally leading to images with more into-the-camera depth) or close up the gap between the stereo images (generally leading to images with more popping-out-of-the-screen depth). While the parallax adjustments work well when you're playing back images in the camera, they don't work when you're playing back images on a 3D TV; they're screen controls rather than footage controls.

In addition to a fully automated 3D mode, the camera gives you manual control over the shutter and aperture settings for each lens, and there's an aperture-priority mode, as well. While those modes are nice to have in the mix, they're not as extensive as the ones you'll find on advanced point-and-shoots and DSLRs. For one thing, you get only three F-stops per focal length in the aperture settings (F3.7, F5.0, and F8.0 at the wide-angle end; F4.2, F5.6, and F9.0 at the telephoto end), and you won't see a dramatic difference in the depth of field due to the camera's small sensor size.

The camera also has an "Advanced 3D" mode that lets you take individual snapshots from as far apart as you want, and the camera stitches together the results to display them in 3D. This is where the parallax controls come in most handy, as you can adjust the playback effects of your self-composed 3D scene during playback.

The manual 3D option is best employed during wide-angle landscape shots, as it lends more far-reaching 3D depth to your images. It also seems to make the layering between the subject's distances more subtle; objects at different distances flow back into the screen more realistically, and there's less of a "flat cardboard cutout" effect between different depths in the scene.

We don't yet have standardized testing for 3D images and video, but we did some informal playback tests of the Finepix Real 3D W3's images and video on three 3D TV sets: Panasonic's Viera TC-P42GT25 and Samsung's UN40C7000, which both use active-shutter glasses, and Vizio's XVT3D650SV, which uses polarized passive 3D glasses. All the videos and images were displayed on the sets by connecting the Real 3D W3 via its HDMI connection.